Simulations Plus, Inc. (NASDAQ: SLP), a leading provider of consulting services and software for pharmaceutical discovery and development, today announced that it has released version 4.0 of its powerful MedChem Studio™ and version 3.0 of its companion MedChem Designer™ software.
Dr. David Miller, team leader for Discovery Cheminformatics at Simulations Plus, said: “One of the primary new features of this version is the ability to recognize chemical structures from images on the screen. Sometimes called ‘optical structure recognition,’ or ‘OSR,’ this feature makes it very simple for a user to capture structures from documents such as web pages, PowerPoint presentations and PDF files without having to manually draw them. Internally, we have found that having the functionality to recognize screen images has been a valuable time-saving tool for our scientists who frequently work with chemistry-related documents.”
Dr. Miller continued: “In addition to OSR, we are for the first time releasing a version of MedChem Studio with 64-bit architecture, enabling the program to use all of the available memory on the customer’s computer, overcoming the 2GB limit intrinsic to all 32-bit software. Since personal computers now routinely support 8GB and more of RAM, the 64-bit version will allow users to handle data sets of practically unlimited size, something that is increasingly important in the pharmaceutical sciences. In addition, this version supports using multiple processors in the same computer for certain operations that require extensive computations, resulting in significant time savings.”
Mr. John DiBella, vice president for marketing and sales for Simulations Plus, added: “MedChem Studio and MedChem Designer are two of the three elements of our ADMET Design Suite™, which we used in our two recent NCE (new chemical entity) molecule design projects for malaria and COX-2/COX-1 inhibitors. Along with our ADMET Predictor™ software for property predictions, MedChem Studio and MedChem Designer have enabled us to design lead molecules that have had a 100% hit rate on their targets in a fraction of the time and cost that would normally be required. As far as we know, it is unprecedented for a software company to take the risk of announcing beforehand that it was going to design new molecules and have them synthesized and tested, and then to report the results, come what may. Prototypes of these new versions of MedChem Studio and MedChem Designer were used along with a beta version of the recently released ADMET Predictor 7.0 in the latest COX-2/COX-1 NCE project, in which the molecules were required to show activity for not just one target, but for two targets at the same time. We believe these demonstrations of the capabilities of the ADMET Design Suite speak for themselves.”